Friday, February 28, 2014

Adelson Galleries in New York City January 19 through March 3, 2007
Museo Correr, Venice, 24 March/22 July 2007

Sargent and Venice, a spectacular artist’s view of the fabled city, was shown in an exhibition that opened in January 2007 at Adelson Galleries in New York city.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), one of a few truly international
artists of the 19th century, had a love affair with Venice: he traveled
there numerous times over 40 years. Adelson Galleries in New York, noted
for its expertise in American art and the work of John Singer Sargent
in particular, has organized an exceptional loan exhibition, Sargent and Venice, comprising of approximately 60 oils and watercolors painted by the artist from the 1880s until 1913.

The exhibition was on view at the gallery from January 19 through March 3, 2007 and then traveled to the Museo Correr in Venice —marking the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in that city—from March 24 through July 22, 2007.

A majority of the paintings shown are on loan from private collections
and have rarely been on public view; several institutions, including the
Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, have loaned important works as well.

Inspired
by the idea of retracing Sargent’s routes down the Venetian waterways,
Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries and the sponsor of the
Sargent catalogue raisonné, saw this approach as a means to gather
together the Venice pictures that appear throughout several volumes of
John Singer Sargent: The Complete Paintings (Yale University Press).

It
was the first such exhibition in New York (Adelson Galleries) and,
remarkably, the venue at the Museo Correr in St. Mark's Square in Venice
was the first exhibition of Sargent ever held in that magical place.

John
Singer Sargent was born in Florence to American parents and lived most
of his adult life in England. Widely recognized as the preeminent
portrait painter of his generation, he felt equally at home in Europe
and the United States where he painted many of the most notable social
and political figures of his day.

Detail, Café on the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, ca. 1880-82'

After “Turner and Venice”, Sargent and Venice was another show which charted a great artist’s response to the city and its lagoon. Venice was, in fact, the place best loved by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the most important of American ‘Impressionists’, who was born in Florence and lived for most of his life in Europe.

Café on the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, ca. 1880-82'

Housed within the neoclassical rooms on the first floor of the Museo Correr, the exhibition – curated by Warren Adelson, Elizabeth Oustinoff and Giandomenico Romanelli– was the fruit of collaboration between the Musei Civici Veneziani and Adelson Galleries of New York; it included approximately sixty works (paintings and watercolours) dating from 1880-1913. There were loans not only from the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, but also from numerous private collections. Thus, the public had the opportunity to see masterpieces that are rarely if ever placed on public display.

Like J.W.Turner and other great nineteenth-century artists, Sargent was fascinated by Venice.
The man himself had grown up in cultured cosmopolitan circles in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. In Paris he had studied under Carolus-Duran and then enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts before embarking on a career as a portrait-painter.

A friend of Monet’s, he would in the second half of the 1870s undertake a number of study trips, experimenting ever more extensively with peinture en plein air.

The exhibition layout was completed by an unusual and
surprising section dedicated to such contemporary Venetian painters as
Milesi, Tito, Selvatico and Nono. A leading figure in a number of Venice
Biennales, Sargent undoubtedly had an influence on these men; but at
times he himself may have been influenced by their work.

Sargent was distantly related to the Curtises, an Anglo-American
family that had taken up residence at Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand
Canal. Both he and Henry James, a friend since the two men had met in
Paris in 1884, stayed there on several occasions.

As a mark of his
appreciation for the Curtises' hospitality during his visit in 1898,
Sargent made an informal portrait in oils of the Curtis parents, Daniel
and Ariana, their son Ralph and his young wife taking tea in the grand
ballroom of the palazzo. The painting, which later acquired the title

was to become one of the artist's most famous
and oft-reproduced images.

When Sargent presented the picture to
Ariana Curtis, she refused it, finding the likeness of herself
unflattering and the raffish pose of her son Ralph, hand-on-hip,
casually draping himself on a gilded table, "indecorous." Her vanity
and prudery were to become the family's loss and the Royal Academy's
gain. The artist subsequently gave it to that institution as his
diploma picture on being received as a full member, and the Academy has
been its owner ever since.

Four years later, in another rare
Venetian oil, Sargent infiltrated his upper-class friend Jane de Glehn,
in the garb of a proletarian local woman, into his

"Venetian Wineshop,"

a sympathetic rendering of the relaxed informality of a typical
lower-class hostelry, almost a low-life pendant to the high-life
drawing-room scene of "An Interior in Venice." In 1904 Sargent was to do
a bravura watercolor of Jane de Glehn, stylishly dressed, elegantly
posed and very much the lady, at ease in a gondola gliding along the
Grand Canal...

Roger
Fry, the critic and member of the Bloomsbury group in London, accused
the artist of reacting to Venice "for all the world like an ordinary
tourist" - a verdict few who see the pictures today will share.
Certainly contemporary buyers and collectors did not concur. In the
two-day-long auction at Christie's of the contents of the artist's
studio after his death, the Venice pictures were the subject of
frenzied bidding. One watercolor alone reached the then-staggering sum
of £4,830.

This gorgeously illustrated book presents nearly seventy of Sargent’s
oil and watercolor paintings of Venice, many of them famous but others
only rarely seen. The book also contains fascinating new photographs of
actual sites depicted in Sargent’s paintings.

Sargent’s early works
in Venice were created in 1880-1882, and he undertook a second, larger
body of work in the city during visits from 1900 to 1913. His responses
to Venice—its local figures, its buildings and waterways, its
extraordinary light—reflect his changing interests over time as well as
his lifelong ability to extend his own reach as a creative artist. The
book considers various aspects of Sargent’s work and milieu in a series
of informative essays by international scholars. They discuss the
evolution of Sargent’s style, the topography of his work in Venice, his
connections with Henry James and other Americans in Venice, Italian
artists in Venice in the nineteenth century, and American artists in
Venice in the nineteenth century.

He made his
first visit to Venice in 1870, returning more than ten times over the
next 40 years and taking this city as the subject of his art more
frequently than any other: in effect, his particular love of Venice
would, from the 1890s to 1913, be reflected in the 150 or so oils and
watercolours. Approximately sixty of these works were shown in the Museo
Correr exhibition. The first Venetian show to be entirely dedicated to
the artist, this exhibition took the form of a gondola ride down the
Grand Canal. Sargent often painted from within a gondola, rendering the
unusual views afforded by this low vantage point.

Palaces,
churches, campi and canals are all enlivened by the play of light on
water and architectural details. However, alongside views of famous
monuments such as the Rialto Bridge, the Doge’s Palace and the Church of
the Salute, there are also evocations of daily life in the Venice of
the time: interiors of workshops, crowded streets, women at work, busy
cafés and osterie, etc. And whether interiors or external scenes, each
of these works reveals the dominant features of Sargent’s art:
exploration of light effects, freedom and precision of line, perfect
mastery of form.

Golden Light, Selections from the Van Otterloo Collection

Following the tremendous public and critical acclaim of PEM's 2011 exhibition, Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, the museum is proud to once again exhibit works from the renowned Van Otterloo collection. Featuring 17th century paintings, Golden Light, Selections from the Van Otterloo Collection
explores Dutch art and life in the 1600s. This new installation
features 15 paintings by Jan Lievens, Emanuel de Witte, Pieter Claesz,
Jan Brueghel the Elder and notable others.

Maria Schalcken (ca. 1647/50 - 1684/1709), The Artist at Work in Her Studio, ca. 1680, Oil on panel, The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection.

A selection of highlights from the remarkable art collection of Eijk and Rose-Marie de Mol van Otterloo was on display at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 2011. The exhibition Made in Holland: Old Masters from a private collection in America featured 44 masterpieces produced by Dutch masters during the Golden Age. Not only are these works of outstanding quality, their subject matter is often intriguing. The selection included works by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Paulus Potter, Jan Steen and Hendrick Avercamp.

History of a Collection

Dutch collectors Eijk and Rose-Marie de Mol van Otterloo, started collecting after their marriage in 1974, initially acquiring antique carriages and English sporting prints. Peter Sutton, current director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, suggested that they collect works by seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Simon Levie (advisor from 1995), former director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Frits Duparc, former director of the Mauritshuis (who took over from Levie in 2009), were closely involved in shaping this exceptionally beautiful collection.

Paintings of extraordinarily high quality continue to be added, such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburg:

‘love at first sight’. Masterpieces by Aert van der Neer, Esaias van de Velde, Gabriel Metsu, Salomon de Bray and Pieter Claesz were acquired in 2008 and 2009.

All Genres Represented

A pretty, yet insolent young girl, a dog sleeping peacefully, winter landscapes or a summer scene with shepherds and picturesque mountains: the pictures in Made in Holland illustrate the versatility of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. In the exhibition, first-rate paintings will be grouped in ensembles, with an emphasis on still lifes, landscapes, genre paintings and portraits.

Among the still lifes, a number of rare works by painters from Middelburg, including Balthasar van der Ast, Ambrosius Bosschaert and Adrian Coorte, are of particular interest. These will be shown alongside works by famous still-life painters such as Jan Davidsz de Heem and Willem Heda.

The Dutch landscape is well represented with, among others, three works by the leading landscape artist of the Golden Age, Jacob van Ruisdael. The work of Nicolaes Berchem, Jan Both, Karel du Jardin and Adam Pijnacker focuses on the Italian landscape.

Father and son Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger depict the Dutch Republic as a seafaring nation. Admirers of seascapes like also enjoyed Jan van de Cappelle and Simon de Vlieger’s beautiful paintings.

In the portraits section, masterpieces by Rembrandt and Frans Hals stood out, while everyday life took center stage in the work of painters such as Jan Steen, Nicolaes Maes, Adriaen van Ostade and Frans van Mieris the Elder. An unexpected highlight was the painting Orpheus Charming the Animals (c. 1640), an early work by Aelbert Cuyp:

In 2011, the complete collection of paintings, together with a smaller collection of antique furniture and objets d’art, went on display in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The exhibition then moved to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and finally to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The 68 exquisite paintings in the Van
Otterloo collection - portraits, still lifes, landscapes, history
paintings, maritime scenes, city profiles and genre scenes - were
created in the 1600s as the Dutch Republic increased in maritime
strength and dominated international trade. Elsewhere in Europe, the
nobility and the Catholic Church were the principal patrons of the arts,
but in the Netherlands, merchants supported artists in unprecedented
numbers. Corrigan notes that "the creative revival and widespread
patronage of the arts in the Netherlands was by no means limited to
paintings. Master craftsmen created works in silver, wood and
mother-of-pearl that were equally prized by their collectors." The
exhibition also features twenty-three examples of furniture and
decorative arts from the Van Otterloo collection. All of these works
graced domestic spaces in the Netherlands as people began to invest
enthusiastically in fine art and welcome it into their homes.

THE COLLECTORS

Eijk
van Otterloo was born in the Netherlands and Rose-Marie in Belgium.
They met and married in the United States, where they developed deep
ties with New England. The couple enjoys living with their collection,
but they are also dedicated to sharing it with others, generously
lending to institutions around the globe. The Van Otterloos have said,
"With Golden, we are delighted to have this opportunity to
share the entire collection with the American public. Within these
works of art lie a world of beauty, meaning and even humor. We hope
that visitors to the exhibition receive as much pleasure, inspiration
and delight from them as we do."

Over the last two decades, the Van
Otterloos have assembled a Dutch and Flemish collection reflecting
their cultural heritage and rivaling any of its kind in the world. With
expert guidance from Dr. Simon Levie, former director of the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Dr. Frederik J. Duparc, former director of
the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Van Otterloos established clear
goals and criteria, making the choices - sometimes to acquire,
sometimes to decline or sell- that hone a connoisseur's discerning eye.

THE EXHIBITION

Great works of art transcend
categorization, but to provide context for the vast flowering of Dutch
and Flemish art in the Golden Age, the exhibition is organized to
reflect the principal themes that artists explored in this period.

Dawn of the Golden Age

Lured
by religious freedom and a better economic climate, many artists fled
northward from cities such as Antwerp, Brussels and Bruges to escape
persecution and the war with Spain in the late 1500s and early 1600s.
They introduced sophisticated new painting styles and together with
Dutch artists created a climate of artistic excellence in the Dutch
Republic.

Artists emphasized the horizon line and
changing weather conditions of the Dutch countryside, often populating
scenes with engaging details of daily life. From the 1560s to the
1620s, Northern Europe endured an extremely cold period known as the
"Little Ice Age." Inspired by the winter landscapes of Flemish artists
who had fled to Amsterdam,Hendrick Avercamp elevated the subject to a
new genre in works such as his Winter Landscape Near a Village.

Faith and Dutch Pride

Dutch
cities swelled with the influx of immigrants from the south taking
refuge in religiously tolerant, albeit strongly Protestant, urban
environments. Protestant churches in the Netherlands were largely
devoid of religious imagery. Instead, artists painted images of
biblical figures and contemporary religious structures such as Jan van
der Heyden's View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam for display in people's homes as expressions of their piety and affluence.

Prosperous Dutch Burghers

Successful
merchants, powerful politicians, influential scholars and other
prominent individuals often commissioned portraits of themselves, their
spouses, and sometimes their children. Rembrandt's portrait of Aeltje
Uylenburgh, the unquestionable jewel of the Van Otterloo collection, is
one of the finest portraits by Rembrandt in private hands. Although the
artist painted it when he was only twenty-six, Rembrandt sensitively
rendered the effects of age and tenderly captured his subject's soft
cheeks, bright eyes, and crisp linen cap.

The Art of Daily Life

The
daily lives of the rich and poor became a new subject for painting
during the Dutch Golden Age. These sometimes humorous genre scenes also
contain allegorical symbolism. The importance of frugality and modesty,
and the fleeting nature of life, were especially popular themes in a
society grappling with how to express its new-found prosperity while
maintaining a pious and humble lives. In this scene by Nicolaes Maes, a
woman deftly picks the pockets of a sleeping man while coyly inviting
the viewer's silence. A beautiful and perhaps cautionary still life of
glasses, jars, pipes and tobacco alludes to the sources for the man's
drowsy vulnerability. Maes studied with Rembrandt and is regarded as
one of his most important pupils.

Allegories of Myth and Morality

Intrigued
by new translations of ancient Greek myths, many Dutch artists
incorporated classical imagery in their work. In this monumental canvas
by Aelbert Cuyp, Orpheus plays the violin for an enchanted menagerie of
animals from Europe and around the globe. Cuyp's ambitious paintings
not only highlight his skills as a landscape and animal painter, but
also the era's lively exchange of artistic, literary and scientific
ideas. Cuyp, who never left Europe and would not have seen many of
these animals firsthand, drew upon prints and stuffed
specimens in aristocratic "cabinets of curiosities" to depict them.
Allegorical imagery was not limited to paintings in 17th-century
Dutch households. The owner of this stunning four-door cupboard could
display it and avoid the criticism of ostentation because the cupboard
served as a daily reminder of his religious obligations-a veritable
"sermon in wood."

Land and Water

The
Dutch Republic dramatically expanded its influence and financial
prospects through voyages around the globe, becoming the dominant
international maritime power in the 17th-century.
Accordingly, Dutch artists were the first to paint the sea in its own
right - a reflection of the importance of water in the nation's psyche.
Maritime views are often characterized by precise depictions of ships
and atmospheric rendering of the weather. The fertile landscape was
similarly a favorite new subject. Cloud-filled skies billowing over a
narrow stretch of earth or sea emphasize the flat horizons for which the
Netherlands is known.

Still-Life: A Table-Top World

The
carefully balanced compositions in Dutch still lifes are often visual
odes to prosperity and pleasure with elements of moralistic symbolism.
As the nation emerged as a powerful mercantile force, Dutch artists
filled their canvases with the staples and luxuries of the trades they
dominated - Dutch cheese, French wine, Baltic grain, South American
tobacco, and Asian porcelain and pepper.

When painting seemingly informal
assemblages, Dutch artists played with balance and depth to enhance the
drama and intimacy of the scene. In Jan Davidsz. de Heem's Glass Vase with Flowers on a Stone Ledge, the
artist used light in innovative ways, spotlighting the intensely
colored flowers against a deep black background. The vase contains
flowers that bloomed at different times of the year, somehow enhancing
their beauty by combining faithful representation with impossibility.

with Harold Gillies’
rarely shown photographs of facially injured soldiers from the Royal College of
Surgeons.

'Self-portrait' by Sir William Orpen', 1917

Showing
how the First World War was depicted and reported with a degree of visual
detail
unprecedented in the history of conflict, the exhibition includes
photography and film as well as formal portraits. Rather than presenting a
military history of the War, the Gallery aims to focus on its human aspect,
concentrating on the way the Great War was represented through portraits of
those involved, an approach never previously adopted.

The
Great War in Portraits takes an international perspective. As well as iconic
portraits of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Winston Churchill, the
exhibition reflects the war experience of those from all social classes who
served from throughout the Commonwealth.

one of the great early modernist
works related to the War; a contrasted pairing of British and German films
devoted to the Battle of the Somme never previously seen together; and a rare
photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont depicting a deserted, battle-scarred
landscape. The only work in the exhibition not to depict people, this poignant
image is, in effect, a portrait of absence.

Starting
with the eve of war, the exhibition includes imposing formal portraits of the
heads of state of the participating nations, evoking those countries that would
be drawn into the conflict in 1914. Such grand images are brought into sharp
contrast with an understated press photograph of a pathetic-looking Gavrilo
Princip, the 19-year-old student whose opportunistic assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914 precipitated the First World War.

The
Great War in Portraits shows how, following the declarations of war throughout
Europe, power devolved from the heads of state to the military leaders of each
country. Power-portraits of Haig, Blumer, Foch, Hindenburg and others, are
contrasted with portraits of the ‘followers,’ by Sickert, Orpen and other war
artists.

In
the central section titled ‘The Valiant and the Damned’, Portraits portraits of
Victoria Cross holders, medal-winners, heroes and aces are shown juxtaposed
with depictions of those whose lives were marked in different ways: casualties,
those disfigured by wounds, prisoners of war, and those shot at dawn for
cowardice. The idealised language of formal portraits, used as celebration and
eulogy, is brought into violent discord with those images, such asnotably a
selection of Henry Tonks's pastels of servicemen grotesquely disfigured by
wounds, that reveal individual suffering and the human cost of war.

An
installation of 40 photographs in a regular grid formation presents a range of
protagonists from medal winners and heroes to the dead and the executed,
interspersed with artists, poets, memoirists and images representing the roles
played by women, the home front and, the Commonwealth.

The
exhibition is curated by Paul Moorhouse, Curator of Twentieth Century
Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London. He says: ‘The Great War in
Portraits explores a complex range of human experience. Evoking different
roles, responsibilities and destinies, it illuminates the way war was
represented through portraits of individuals – each caught up in events beyond
reason or control.’

Grid: Photographic portraits of World War I protagonists, at the National
Portrait Gallery
The show’s centrepiece is a vast, 40-photo grid of all manner of Great War
participants. Some are familiar (Wilfred Owen; Baron von Richthofen; Mata
Hari); others less so. We meet Walter Tull, the first black officer in the
British army; Billie Nevill, the captain who kicked a football across No
Man’s Land; Maria Botchkareva, leader of Russia’s women-only Battalion of
Death; and Harry Farr, the shell-shocked private executed for desertion in
1916 (and officially pardoned in 2006).
Their grouping underscores the indiscriminate way the Great War sucked people
from all backgrounds into its vortex.
Undoubtedly the most moving images on show, though, are the pastel
drawings by Henry Tonks of facially disfigured soldiers awaiting
reconstructive surgery back in Blighty.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, November 9, 2013–February 2, 2014, (click on link for lots more information and images)
National Academy Museum 1083 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128 February 27 through May 18, 2014

The National Academy presents a major retrospective of Anders Zorn (1860-1920), one of the greatest Swedish painters at the turn of the 20th century. A virtuoso watercolorist, bravura painter, and etcher, Zorn rose from humble beginnings in the Swedish countryside to travel the world, captivate American artists and politicians alike, and paint some of the most-sought after portraits of America’s Gilded Age.

Featuring 90 rarely seen works, oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and sculptures, drawn from public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States, this major retrospective, on view February 27 through May 18, 2014, reveals the vibrant artistic personality of Sweden’s master painter.

A truly international artist, Zorn’s traveled early in his career to Spain and Algeria where the intense color and light inspired this skillful watercolorist to perfect his craft. Later in Paris, influenced ̶ by the Impressionists, he chronicled modern life, while in America he rivaled John Singer Sargent as the most sought-after portraitist of high society. During his seven trips to the United States, he portrayed bankers, and industrialists including Andrew Carnegie, and even three presidents - Presidents Grover Clevand, Theodore Roosevelt, and, in a portrait that still hangs in the White House today, William Howard Taft. Back in Sweden he painted scenes of the Swedish countryside, his native folk culture and the beauty and serenity of the Nordic landscape.

The illegitimate son of a Bavarian brewer, Zorn was born into humble circumstances in 1860. Raised by his mother on his grandparents’ farm in Mora, Sweden, Zorn’s artistic virtuosity blossomed early. At the age of fifteen, he was accepted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Soon after, one of his paintings was purchased by King Oscar II of Sweden.

In 1881, Zorn met his future wife, Emma Lamm, who hailed from a wealthy Jewish family. During the four years of their secret engagement, Zorn worked diligently to achieve success in the art world, and thus secure a future with Lamm. After gaining international recognition with work accepted for the Paris Salon and garnering commissions as a portrait painter, Zorn and Lamm wed. Her intelligence and social connections contributed to a powerful partnership, and his respect for her is seen in one of his earliest oil paintings,

Emma Reading.

Zorn travelled the globe, finding inspiration in Stockholm, Madrid, Algiers, Constantinople, London, Paris, Venice, New York and Chicago. His subject matter ranged as widely as his travels: from Swedish peasants at work to American presidents including Grover Cleveland, William Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt, and from high society ladies poised in their finest clothing to voluptuous nudes frolicking the countryside. It was fitting that one of Lamm’s cousins called Zorn “a hybrid between a gentleman and a farmer.”

Zorn temporarily relocated to Paris just in time for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a breakthrough moment his work as a painter. He was shortly thereafter decorated with the Legion d’Honneur, the most prestigious order in France.

Over the course of seven extensive visits to the United States, Zorn became one of the most sought-after portraitists of the Gilded Age—rivaling John Singer Sargent in popularity. He painted in an elegant, assured style that captivated wealthy, influential members of society: American bankers, industrial magnets, and politicians. His involvement with the Swedish section of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 led to his meeting with many members of American high society, including influential art collectors Charles Deeving and Isabella Stewart Gardiner, whom he went on to paint and etch.

In 1896, Zorn resettled in his hometown of Mora, where he painted scenes of rural and urban life during a time when Sweden was transforming itself from a primarily agrarian society into one more dependent on industry. His painting

Midsummer Dance,

which revels in rural traditions, is considered one of Sweden’s national treasures.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

This exhibition features the beautiful art of Chiaroscuro woodcuts in works from two of the finest collections in the world. Conceived as independent works or based on the designs of the greatest Renaissance artists such as Parmigianino, Raphael and Titian, this pioneering 16th-century printing technique breathed new life into well-known biblical scenes and legends; from Perseus slaying the Medusa to Aeneas Fleeing Troy, and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes.

150 of the rarest and most exquisite examples of this forgotten art form, with a focus on the craftsmanship of its proponents in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, demonstrate how the chiaroscuro method was used to create the first colour prints that make dramatic use of light and dark.

Created by established artists for a wider public, they were collected and appreciated both as mementos of famous works in other media and in their own right for their sheer technical brilliance and visual power.

Hendrick Goltzius, 'Landscape with Trees and a Shepherd Couple', c. 1593-98, "Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from three blocks, the tone blocks in pale green and green. 11.7 x 15.3 cm. Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina, Vienna.

Hans Burgkmair the Elder, 'St George and the Dragon', c. 1508-10." "Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from two blocks, the tone block in beige. 31.9 x 22.5 cm. Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina, Vienna."